Seriously though, trying to understand a detail about how this all works (anyone free to answer). Does each additional user to a smaller instance indirectly help flesh out the available content on that user's instance?

As in, more total users -> more total community/magazine subs by those users --> more federated content becomes visible to the instance's newest joiners after that?

Unless I'm misunderstanding how it works. If that's correct, then the benefit of each additional user would be most visible the fewer the instance's current users, and then eventually level out as more users join and the most popular remote communities/magazines are subbed by local users.

I mention this because I've occasionally browsed other instances during brief outages on my home instance. At those times I noticed that while the default feeds (not logged in) across instances looked mostly the same, some of the smaller ones were missing some fun/interesting magazines that the others were showing.

P.S. I don't think this was due to defederations but who knows.